Women & Cocaine Presents Baby Face at The Cinema Museum

Women & Cocaine Presents is a new film night at the Cinema Museum to celebrate the Fierce and Liberated women of Pre code cinema.

From the period of 1930 to 1934, before the introduction of censorship (known as the Hays Code) Women were depicted in roles with a frankness and sex-positivity that remains rare even today. These newly independent women pushed gender boundaries as they pursued their own economic freedom and excitement, defying the previous Victorian ideals of domesticity, sexual purity and religion.

Hollywood soon caught on and began to represent these women on screen, and there is probably no other movie that offended the censors as much as Baby Face did in 1933.

“Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, brought up by her sleazy single father in an even sleazier bar somewhere in the sticks. When he dies and she is left alone, her mentor advises her to use her feminine powers and go to the big city. So off she goes with her maid in tow, arriving in New York City, she finds the biggest building she can and decides to use her sexuality to get a job there, but she wants more and she knows how to get it. Lily decides to climb her way to the top, floor by floor, breaking much more than hearts along the way.”

Come join us in this beautifully historic Grade II listed venue for a Discussion, then screening of the film.

“My father warned me about men & booze, but he never mentioned a word about Women & Cocaine”
– Tallulah Bankhead